Kazan Operation - Background

Background

Following the capture of Samara by the Czech Legion on 8 June, several members of the Constituent Assembly, which had been dissolved by the Bolsheviks, organized an Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (in russian "Constituent Assembly" was "Uchreditel'noe Sobranie", hence the abbreviation for Committee was "Komuch"). This threatened to form an alternative socialist government to the Bolshevik regime. In August 1918, the Whites occupied Kazan. Bolshevik forces were defeated, and they dispersed to Kazan's neighborhood. The Whites shot the rest of Bolsheviks in the city.

The Fifth Army has been assigned the task of taking Kazan. Our enemy is trying to break through from Kazan to Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, Vyatka and Vologda, to link up with the Anglo-French troops, and to crush the heart of the workers’ revolution – Moscow. But before Kazan stand the workers’ and peasants’ regiments of the Red Army. They know what their task is: to prevent the enemy from taking a single step forward: to wrest Kazan from his grasp: to throw back the Czech mercenaries and the officer-thugs, drown them in the Volga, and crush their criminal mutiny against the workers’ revolution.In this conflict we are using not only rifles, cannon and machine guns, but also newspapers. For the newspaper is also a weapon. The newspaper binds together all units of the Fifth Army in one thought, one aspiration, one will. Foward to Kazan! Leon Trotsky August 1918

At the beginning of the operation, the Reds' disposition was as follows: To the west of Kazan were the Fifth Army of the Eastern Front under Peter Slaven and the Volga Flotilla under Fyodor Raskolnikov; to the east of Kazan was the Arsk group of the Second Army under Woldemar Azin. They opposed the Czechoslovak legion and KomUch People's Army under A. P. Stepanov.